When metal becomes superconducting, new optical excitation channels are created by particle-hole mixing. These excitation channels contribute negligibly to optical responses in most superconductors, but they can be relevant in ultra-strong-coupling superconductors that are close to the Bose-Einstein condensate regime. Recently, selection rules for these excitations have been formulated based on single-particle anti-unitary symmetries in the mean-field theory. While being potentially useful for studying optical properties of ultra-strong-coupling superconductors, they had fundamental limitations because significant quantum fluctuations invalidate mean-field approaches. Here, we use many-body states to formulate an optical selection rule that does not rely on the mean-field approximation. In this approach, the physical meaning of the previous selection rules becomes clearer as they are simply recast as the selection rule for many-body inversion eigenstates, not involving anti-unitary symmetries. This selection rule applies not only to the Bogoliubov quasiparticles of Fermi liquids but also to non-Fermi-liquid quasiparticles and electrically charged bosonic excitations. We also study the Bogoliubov Fermi surfaces, whose topological stability is closely related to the selection rule. We provide a many-body formulation of their topological charges and show that the low-energy optical conductivity of the Bogoliubov Fermi surfaces depends crucially on their secondary topological charge. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results to the stability of the superconducting state.
We report the first comprehensive microscopic description of the thermal fluctuations tuned Fermi surface characteristics in a non-centrosymmetric superconductor, in presence of an in-plane Zeeman field. Using a non perturbative approach we demonstrate that short range fluctuating superconducting pair correlations give rise to segmentation of the Fermi surface with direction dependent pair breaking and hotspots for quasiparticle scattering. Further, a fluctuation driven change in the Fermi surface topology is realized, characterized by a shift of the corresponding Dirac point from the trivial …
We discuss a novel physical mechanism which gives rise to a giant magnetoconductivity in non-centrosymmetric superconducting films. This mechanism is caused by a combination of spin-orbit interaction and inversion symmetry breaking in the system, and arises in the presence of an in-plane magnetic field ${\bf H}_\|$. It produces a contribution to the conductivity, which displays a strong dependence on the angle between the electric field ${\bf E}$ and ${\bf H}_\|$, and is proportional to the inelastic relaxation time of quasiparticles. Since in typical situations the latter is much larger than …
Tunnelling between non-centrosymmetric superconductors with significant spin-orbit splitting studied theoretically within a two-band treatment
本文从理论上研究了具有显著自旋轨道分裂的非中心对称超导体之间的隧穿问题。我们发现临界约瑟夫森电流可以通过改变描述结每一侧不存在反转对称性的矢量之间的相对角度来调制。两个间隙的存在也导致准粒子电流-电压特性中的多个台阶。我们认为，这两种效应可能有助于确定在CePt $_3$ Si，UIr和Cd $_2$ Re $_2$ O $_7$材料的配对状态。我们提出这些想法的实验测试，包括扫描隧道显微镜。
The search for topological superconductors (TSCs) is one of the most urgent contemporary problems in condensed matter systems. TSCs are characterized by a full superconducting gap in the bulk and topologically protected gapless surface (or edge) states. Within each vortex core of TSCs, there exist the zero energy Majorana bound states, which are predicted to exhibit non-Abelian statistics and to form the basis of the fault-tolerant quantum computation. So far, no stoichiometric bulk material exhibits the required topological surface states (TSSs) at Fermi level combined with fully gapped bulk …
Non-centrosymmetric superconductors have recently attracted much attention, since the lack of inversion symmetry mixes spin singlet and triplet pairing states, which may allow the realization of topological superconductivity. In this work, we study the electronic properties of the family of inversion-broken CeTX$_3$ heavy-fermion superconductors, finding topological nodal lines as well as Dirac and Weyl points, which are renormalized closer to the Fermi energy by correlations. We find that the Weyl nodal lines have a substantial effect on the Fermi surface spin structure of the normal state, a…
Probing Cooper pair momentum by quasiparticle steering with planar Josephson junctions
QuTech, Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学 QuTech）；Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学卡弗里纳米科学研究所）；Donostia International Physics Center（圣塞巴斯蒂安国际物理中心）；Center for Quantum Devices, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学尼尔斯·玻尔研究所量子器件中心）
We calculate the quasiparticle dispersion and spectral weight of the quasiparticle that results when a hole is added to an antiferromagnetically ordered CuO$_2$ plane of a cuprate superconductor. We also calculate the magnon contribution to the quasiparticle spectral function. We start from a multiband model for the cuprates considered previously [Nat. Phys. \textbf{10}, 951 (2014)]. We map this model and the operator for creation of an O hole to an effective one-band generalized $t-J$ model, without free parameters. The effective model is solved using the state of the art self-consistent Born…
In conventional superconductors, electrons of opposite spins are bound into Cooper pairs. However, when the superconductor is in contact with a non-uniformly ordered ferromagnet, an exotic type of superconductivity can appear at the interface, with electrons bound into three possible spin-triplet states. Triplet pairs with equal spin play a vital role in low-dissipation spintronics. Despite the observation of supercurrents through ferromagnets, spectroscopic evidence for the existence of equal-spin triplet pairs is still missing. Here we show a theoretical model that reveals a characteristic g…
From the sixties a deep and surprising connection has followed the development of superconductivity and quantum field theory. The Anderson-Higgs mechanism and the similarities between the Dirac and Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations are the most intriguing examples. In this last analogy, the massive Dirac particle is identified with a quasiparticle excitation and the fermion mass energy with the superconducting gap energy. Here we follow further this parallelism and show that it predicts an outstanding phenomenon: the superconducting Schwinger effect (SSE). As in the quantum electrodynamics Schwin…
